Abstract
In this chapter I argue that Sartre, Fichte, and Levinas all reject the traditional approach to the problem of other minds in favor of phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity. With differing emphases, they claim that our normative and affective engagement with others precedes any epistemic question about the existence of conscious, self-determining, or morally considerable persons outside of ourselves. In doing so, they also transform our understanding of what it means to be a subject. Despite this convergence in their approaches, Levinas most radically repudiates the ideal of autonomous subjectivity at the core of the problem of other minds.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, John Russon, “The Body as Site of Action and Intersubjectivity in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right,” in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide, ed. Gabriel Gottlieb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 138–56; Violetta L. Waibel, Daniel Breazeale, and Tom Rockmore (eds.), Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010); and Robert Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
- 2.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 77.
- 3.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 304.
- 4.
Annette Baier, “Cartesian Persons,” in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 89–90.
- 5.
Ibid., 84.
- 6.
See Lorraine Code, “Second Persons,” in What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 71–109.
- 7.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 342.
- 8.
Ibid., 343.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid., 345.
- 11.
Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 162.
- 12.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 471–74.
- 13.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (Brooklyn: Haskell House, 1948), 51–52.
- 14.
See Sebastian Gardner, “Sartre, Intersubjectivity, and German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43, no. 3 (July 2005): 325–51.
- 15.
Catalano, Commentary, 158.
- 16.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 376.
- 17.
Ibid., 337.
- 18.
Ibid., 338.
- 19.
There is an interesting proximity between Fichte and Sartre on the role that the body plays in intersubjectivity: see FNR 53–74 and Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 445–60.
- 20.
Drew M. Dalton, “Strange Bedfellows: A Re-Examination of the Work of J. G. Fichte in Light of the Levinasian Critique,” Idealistic Studies 36, no.1 (Spring 2006), 19.
- 21.
See Allen W. Wood, “Deduction of the Summons and the Existence of Other Rational Beings,” in Gottlieb, Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, 84–87.
- 22.
Ibid., 87.
- 23.
Frederick Neuhouser, “Fichte on the Relationship between Right and Morality,” in Fichte: Historical Contexts/Contemporary Controversies, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1994), 173.
- 24.
Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
- 25.
Neuhouser, “Fichte on the Relationship between Right and Morality,” 162–77.
- 26.
Daniel Breazeale, “The First-Person Standpoint of Fichte’s Ethics,” Philosophy Today 52, no. 3/4 (Fall–Winter 2008): 270–81.
- 27.
Matthew C. Altman makes the point that in his discussion of the conscience, Fichte inverts the typical order of establishing the morally considerable attributes of the other and then deriving my moral obligations to that person. Instead, I first experience moral resistance to treating them as a mere object and on that basis am practically committed to the belief that they are rational and self-determining persons. See “Fichte’s Practical Response to the Problem of Other Minds,” Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte 16 (2018): https://journals.openedition.org/ref/859.
- 28.
Wood, “Deduction of the Summons,” 83.
- 29.
F. W. J. Schelling, “New Deduction of Natural Right,” in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 13; quoted in SE 213 (GA I/5:204).
- 30.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 82.
- 31.
Ibid., 38.
- 32.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 346–47.
- 33.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 168.
- 34.
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 48.
- 35.
Ibid., 135.
- 36.
Ibid., 51.
- 37.
Ibid., 89.
- 38.
Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” 168.
- 39.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 39.
- 40.
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 166.
- 41.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness,” in Entre Nous, 130.
- 42.
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 48.
- 43.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Philosophical Determination of the Idea of Culture” in Entre Nous, 185.
- 44.
See Diane Perpich, “Levinas, Feminism, and Identity Politics,” in Radicalizing Levinas, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 28–33.
- 45.
See Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
- 46.
See David Livingstone Smith, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011); and Charles W. Mills, “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1–19.
- 47.
Support for this scholarship was generously provided by the School of Graduate Studies at Central Washington University.
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Coe, C.D. (2019). Fichte, Sartre, and Levinas on the Problem with the Problem of Other Minds. In: Hoeltzel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Fichte Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26508-3_22
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